Eleanor Marie Brown

Eleanor Marie Brown

Eleanor Marie Brown

Affiliate Professor of Rock Ethics

Education

JD, Yale University
MPhil, Politics, Oxford University
BS, Molecular Biology, Brown University

Biography

A leading scholar of property, migration, globalization, development, and the law, Eleanor Brown has been published in the California Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the New York University Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, among many others.  

She has also published with the New Republicthe New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and has been a commentator on NPR. Among Brown’s academic accolades, her paper, “The Blacks Who ‘Got’ Their 40 Acres,” was one of two papers selected in the property category for the Yale/Harvard/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum.  

Prior to joining Penn State, Brown was a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, where she also directed the Institute for Immigration Studies. She has previously been a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, a GWIPP Fellow at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, and a Reginald Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School.  

She is a member of the board of directors of the Association for Law, Property and Society, the Conference Planning Committee for the Immigration Law Professors Association, and the Fellowship Committee for the Association of University WomenShe has also served on the Scholarly Prize Committee for the Law and Society Association. 

Brown, a Jamaican national, was previously a senior executive at the Caribbean Investment Fund, L.P., the first pan-Caribbean private equity fund in the British Commonwealth Caribbean, and a chair of the Jamaica Trade Board. Brown has recently been appointed by Andrew Holness, the prime minister of Jamaica, to the CARICOM Commission.  

She has served on the boards of several publicly traded Caribbean companies and was the youngest director of two subsidiaries of the Bank of Nova Scotia (Jamaica), one of the largest subsidiaries of the largest Canadian bank (by market capitalization). Brown chaired the Conduct Review Committee of the Board for Scotia Jamaica Investment Management. She was a member of the Sugar Enterprise Team, the entity appointed by the Jamaican Cabinet to oversee private sector participation in the Jamaican sugar sector. 

Selected Publications

The Nature Of the Farm (Co-Authored with Ian Ayres, Draft in Progress))

The Blacks who got their 40 Acres: A Theory of Asset Acquisition (manuscript to be submitted 2022)

Fertility, Immigration, and Public Support for Parenting, 90 Fordham L. Rev. 2485 (2022) (with Naomi Cahn & June Carbone)

Why Black Homeowners are More Likely to be Caribbean-American than African American in New York: A Theory of how Early West Indian Migrants Broke Racial Cartels in Housing, 61 Am. J. Legal Hist. 3 (2021)

Race, Property and Citizenship, Nw. U.L. Rev. Online 120 (2021) (with June Carbone)

On the Evolution of Property Ownership Among Former Slaves Turned Freedmen (Submitted: Journal of Law, Property and Society)

On Black South Africans, Black Americans and Black West Indians: Some Thoughts on Atuahene’s We Want What’s Ours (Michigan Law Review, 2016)

Guest Work as Sex Work: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Margaret Radin and Black Women Selling Sex Across Borders in Black Women and International Law: Deliberate Interactions, Movements, and Actions (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

An Alternative View of Immigrant Exceptionalism, Particularly as It Relates to Blacks: A Response to Chua and Rubenfeld, Review of Amy Chua & Jed Rubenfeld, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America; Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. (California Law Review, 2015).

‘The Blacks Who 'Got Their Forty Acres': A Theory of Black West Indian Migrant Asset Acquisition (New York University Law Review, 2014).

Outsourcing Criminal Deportees (University of Chicago Law Review, 2013).

A Visa To “Snitch”: An Addendum to Cox and Posner (Notre Dame Law Review, 2012)

Visa as Property, Visa as Collateral (Vanderbilt Law Review, 2011).

Outsourcing Immigration Compliance (Fordham Law Review, 2009).

Black Like Me? 'Gangsta' Culture, Clarence Thomas, and Afrocentric Academies, (New York University Law Review, 2000).

"The Tower of Babel," in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Richard Delgado and Stefanic, Temple University Press, 1997.)

The Tower of Babel: Bridging the Divide between Critical Race Theory and 'Mainstream' Civil Rights Scholarship (Yale Law Journal,1995).

 

News

Human Rights Society announces inaugural “Ona Judge Award” recipients

Professor Brown and colleague write op-ed on police distrust in progressive c...

Professor Brown pens op-ed for The Philadelphia Inquirer

Professor Brown and colleague join WPSU to discuss barriers to police reform

Eleanor Brown joins Penn State Law faculty

Website(s)

Eleanor Marie Brown